Where those associated with Western films from around the world are laid to rest.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

RIP Audrey Young

Audrey Young, an actress at Paramount Pictures in the 1940s and the widow of
director Billy Wilder, has died. She was 89. Wilder, one of the great
directors of Hollywood's golden age, died in 2002.

Young was a starlet
and contract player at Paramount appearing in mostly uncredited roles when she
met Wilder in 1944 on the set of his film "The Lost Weekend," which starred Ray
Milland as an alcoholic on a bender; Young played a hat-check girl in the film,
but her scene was cut. Young and Wilder married in 1949.

The actress
made her film debut in 1944's "Lady in the Dark." She had credited roles in
movies including "George White's Scandals," "Follow That Woman," "College Queen"
and "Danger Street."

Young, who had been a singer with the Tommy Dorsey
Band, sometimes appeared as a lone singer or as part of singing group in her
films, as in "Out of This World," "Easy Living" and Bing Crosby vehicle "Blue
Skies."

After 1949, the year she married Wilder, she had only other film
role, in 1955's Doris Day-James Cagney starrer "Love Me or Leave Me," but later
she served as a costume consultant for Wilder on "Some Like It Hot" and "The
Apartment."

Young was born in Los Angeles; her father and uncles worked
in the film industry building sets. After Wilder's death, Audrey Wilder donated
$5 million to create the Billy Wilder Theater, home of the UCLA Film &
Television Archive's cinematheque, at the Hammer Museum in Westwood.

She
and Wilder did not have children, though the director had two children with his
previous wife.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.